Progress Report (Patreon)

Howdy! Here’s what’s up:

We’ve been crunching as hard as humanly possible to have a release today, but unfortunately we didn’t make it. There’s just too many pictures.

However, based on the amount of work left, I feel comfortable saying that the next version will be uploaded sometime next week.

This month we’ve been busy layering shower events, layering a new “Mother” event and I played around with the idea of updating Kira’s face again. Our plan still stands, next update will have shower layers and a “Mother” Pregnancy event (0.4.9.9a), then we’ll spend a month on updating NPC’s artwork (0.4.9.9b) and finally - move in with the main story in v0.5.

We would've finished this sooner, but I really wanted to fully layer the “Mother” event (to include all planned customization options) and it resulted in the event having 200 pictures + some words. Which isn’t really a big deal for us, but there’s also some limited animation in it and a 30 pages long script that has to be synced with it.

Basically, what I’m saying is that we still need to “direct” the flow of the event, to properly time flashing words and flying “glass shards” that you can see on the teaser above with the text. Apart from that, the event is already coded, drawn, layered and written.

I also got a little bit carried away while editing its text and accidentally wrote the next “Mother” event, which still needs to be edited to include all references, but it gives me a definitive idea of what will happen next.

So, while the upcoming Mother event is centered around pregnancy and is unavailable to some people for that reason, the one after that will be available for everyone. And you won’t miss out on any artwork from the current event, because I will reuse it there as an intro.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about Kira’s face:

Above you can see my latest version of Kira’s face. I utilized AI as an assistant of sorts  -  used its generated images as references and as spare parts (like eyelashes). The main reason why I did this is rather simple - I want Kira to be the best looking girl in the game and with the upcoming NPC artwork overhaul, she might get overshadowed by some ladies (if she isn’t already).

I already teased this image on our discord and got plenty of useful feedback/suggestions, now I want to hear the opinion of those of you who haven't seen it yet. Right after the release of 0.4.9.9a I’ll start working on NPC’s and different versions of Kira’s face, so I’m hoping to get as much feedback as possible before returning to work on this face.

Then, with all your feedback taken into account, I’ll make a couple of versions and poll you all on which one’s the best. And if you don’t like this new face and won’t like any of my future iterations, you’ll be able to vote on the “keep the old face” option in the poll. This way we will all decide on what Kira’s face should be moving forward and I hope no one gets upset.

And if you’re wondering how much time it would take for me to implement a new face, I believe I’ll need a week to draw all expressions for whatever face wins the poll and another week to implement it all over the game. So, in theory, this upgrade can potentially happen in v0.5.1 and I promise I won’t spend another six months on reworking everything, if I’ll see that it’s taking more time than we can afford - I’ll just stop doing it.

I know that for a while our updates were more focused on the art instead of text, and we’re going to fix that injustice in v0.5. But, before that, I’d like to deal with some technical debt we’ve accumulated over the years - just the NPC’s (for now).

It’s also worth mentioning that all our latest events have all layers, 60-80% of pictures they have are not yet available and are there for the future, Which is a huge waste of effort on one hand, but on the other - the moment we’ll add something new, it will be automatically shown everywhere which is awesome, plus - we won’t accumulate even more “technical debt”.

That’s all I’ve got to share today, the next update will be published sometime next week and then we’ll begin working on character art, polling you on NPC’s appearances, Kira’s face and other art related things.

Thank you all for your patience and support, the end is near!